Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Democrats were the adults in the room when they agreed to vote for a CR without Ukraine funding. Saving McCarthy was a bridge too far.

Greg Sargent on this irritating notion among much of the punditocracy that the Democrats are at fault for the mess in the House because they failed to step up and save Kevin McCarthy from the monster he helped create:

Because Republicans are such firm believers in benevolence toward political foes, they are furious with Democrats for failing to save Kevin McCarthy. After Democrats voted en masse this week to remove the California Republican as House speaker, his fellow Republicans responded by revoking some of Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol office privileges. They are reportedly planning more acts of retaliation.

But Democrats were right not to save McCarthy. With the forces unleashed by former president Donald Trump and the MAGA movement damaging the House GOP caucus, Democrats absolutely shouldn’t have stepped in, because so doing would help Republicans erase their own culpability for nourishing those forces for so long.

Republicans believe Democrats should have joined most of them to vote against the motion to vacate the speakership that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) brought against McCarthy, which would have enabled him to survive despite eight GOP insurgents voting to remove him. As Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman reports, Republicans intend to “exact revenge for a long while.” McCarthy himself was reportedly behind the retaliation against Pelosi.

All of that is absurd, but it’s also revealing. In a sense, what Republicans really wanted from Democrats is help in solving a problem that’s grown intractable for them: At critical moments such as these, there’s nothing holding the House GOP majority together.

If the shoe were on the other foot, I think we all know what the Republicans would have done.

The adults stepped up to keep the government open and they did it with great regret that these monsters had put them in that position. But they did it to spare the American people of the suffering the Republicans were prepared to inflict if they didn’t get their way. 91 Republicans voted against it anyway. There was no good reason at that point to do anything to help the GOP caucus resolve their internal differences.

This is part of a much bigger dynamic. Every time the Republicans get in office they blow up the budget, start wars, slash important programs and otherwise fuck everything up. Then the Democrats are called in to clean up their messes, they clean them up and then the Republicans come in and ride their success until they fuck everything up again. It’s happened over and over again.

A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.

It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”

Annual GDP rate:

What, then, are the most plausible theories?

First, it’s worth rejecting a few unlikely possibilities. Congressional control is not the answer. The pattern holds regardless of which party is running Congress. Deficit spending also doesn’t explain the gap: It is not the case that Democrats juice the economy by spending money and then leave Republicans to clean up the mess. Over the last four decades, in fact, Republican presidents have run up larger deficits than Democrats.

That leaves one broad possibility with a good amount of supporting evidence: Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation. Democrats, in short, have been more pragmatic.

And yet for decades the Republicans have been seen as “the grownups” largely because of outdated hippie bashing left over from the 1960s. They have never been “grown-ups” at least not since Eisenhower’s time. They’ve been increasingly radical know-nothings dependent on grotesque grievances and racism to keep their voters happy and it’s been depressingly successful. But the news media’s insistence that because they insist on a formal dress code or pretend they go to church they are the mature adults has contributed largely to their ability to win elections.

If there is one bright spot in all this mess it’s that this myth may have finally been dispelled. No one can claim that the party of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz is the party of mature adults. They are nihilistic anarchists.

And you need to hear it too

Greg Gutfeld says “elections don’t work” and “society is in peril and chaos because our elections don’t matter” while urging for a new American civil war.

In the following tweets, I will transcribe everything he says in this clip, because it goes into some very dark territory. pic.twitter.com/2FLCz5ptCP

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) October 5, 2023

This is not a joke, even though Gutfeld presents himself as a comedian. It’s not funny. It’s terrifying. And it’s exactly what the Trump cult is being fed day in and day pout. It’s not just him.  It’s the entire right wing media universe. Between Trump, Fox, the lesser cable newsers, the internet, Steve Bannon and his ilk etc., they’re managing to brainwash tens of millions of Americans.: 

“Only certain people get criminal mulligans and Jan. 6 protestors, they don’t get criminal mulligans and here’s why. They’re the oppressor. So the oppressed get criminal mulligans. The people who are complaining, like us, we’re actually oppressors and we’re losing power so that’s why we are upset. I just got a job at MSNBC.

So let’s compare the rights between criminals and victims, ok? Criminals get a mulligan, they can steal up to $900 worth of stuff, they can loiter, sleep, and shoot up in public area including playgrounds, they can loot and burn and call it social justice. They can pile up dozens of arrests and never do time. Meanwhile, what about us? Well we have to change our lives to accommodate risk wherever we go.

We have to move out of cities for the sake of the safety of our families and our own safety. That’s what’s happening. We are being driven out of cities by the oppressed, so I return to my imperfect analogy from yesterday. We had a war over slavery. We knew slavery was inhumane and immoral, but somehow we couldn’t solve slavery peacefully. It was an evil, but one side refused to acknowledge it was evil because it was too big of an admission for them to make.

Doesn’t that feel that way now? That this defiant refusal to reverse this decline argues against the survival of a country.”

“What does that leave you with? It leaves you with you need to make war to bring peace because you have a side that cannot change. Because then that means the admission that their beliefs have been corrupt all the time. So, in a way, you have to force them to surrender.”

Jesse Watters: “Or we can make love not war.”

Greg: “Ugh, I tried that once–”

Harold Ford Jr.: “Or we can have an election.”

Greg: “–I had to go to a doctor.”

Martha MacCallum: “Yeah, elections!”

Greg: “No, elections don’t work. We know that. We know they don’t work!”

Harold: “They do work.”

Greg: “Look what we have! We had a moderate president and we have crime exploding everywhere. We had a Democrat president promise that he was going to be moderate, promise that he was gonna unite the country and now we have a terrible education system.”

Greg: “We have no border. We have crime everywhere. Every facet of society is in peril and in chaos because our elections don’t matter.”

Harold: “No, elections do matter. We don’t need to go to war for it, we go to the election booth and vote the people out…”

The End.

Set down your coffee cup before reading

Daily Beast:

The judge who doomed Donald Trump’s family business last week took an aggressive and preemptive step on Wednesday to ensure the former president can’t secretly shift assets to salvage his real estate empire.

In an order that was posted on the fourth day of the former president’s bank fraud trial, Justice Arthur F. Engoron commanded that the Trumps identify any corporations they have—and come clean about any plans to move around money in an attempt to hide or keep their wealth.

Seriously? And Engoron expects Trump to comply?

Sure, it’s something the case demands. But this is Donald J. Trump and family we’re talking about.

It’s a powerful maneuver meant to counter the sort of underhanded moves Trump has displayed so far during the three-year investigation.

Trump, sons Don Jr. and Eric, and two other top executives were ordered to tell the court about “any other entity [that] is controlled or beneficially owned” by them, “any creation of a new entity to hold or acquire the assets,” and “any anticipated transfer of assets.”

The judge also empowered a court-appointed monitor currently babysitting the Trump Organization, a former federal judge named Barbara Jones, to manage this phase until someone can be appointed to disintegrate Trump’s companies.

Yeah, good luck with that, Barbara.

I’m running out of W’s T’s and F’s

Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) last night responded to a Daily Mail article. (Yeah, I’m wondering about that too.) The post:

BREAKING: While IRS was pursuing felony charges against addict Hunter Biden, they were pursuing a mere lien against addict Rudy Giuliani.

I’m sorry, what?

The IRS has placed a lien on Rudy Giuliani’s $4.5 million penthouse after accusing the fallen attorney of owing more than half a million dollars in unpaid taxes, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The federal tax agency claims the 79-year-old former New York City mayor owes $549,435.26 in unpaid income taxes for 2021, according to a notice filed in court in Palm Beach County, Florida.

The IRS placed a lien on Giuliani’s penthouse in Palm Beach, just three miles north of former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

If Giuliani doesn’t pay up, the September 1 lien allows the IRS to seize some of the profits from Giuliani’s condo if it were to be sold.

Surely Venezuelan software in the IRS machines is responsible.

There are “rich and famous” photos of the apartment included. Who cares?

No additional details as of this writing that would explain the difference between the two tax delinquents.

We interrupt regular broadcasting to relay the news that the IRS slapped a lien on Rudy Giuliani for $550k in unpaid taxes. pic.twitter.com/L92S7pqDh7

— mrs panstreppon (@mrspanstreppon) October 5, 2023

CNBC follows up:

Last month, Giuliani’s former lawyers sued him over allegations that he had not paid legal fees that they said amounted to $1.36 million. Giuliani responded to the lawsuit by saying the dollar amount being sought was excessive.

Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, also faces a $10 million lawsuit filed by Noelle Dunphy, a woman whose allegations included Giuliani’s harassing her and discussing the selling of presidential pardons after she was hired in 2019. Giuliani has denied the claims.

In August, a federal judge found Giuliani liable for defaming two election workers in boosting former President Donald Trump’s stolen election claims.

Oh, Rudy must miss the good old days of smoking cigars with Lev and Igor.

There is so much going on here.

It’s a photo of Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas & Igor Fruman. On their phones. At a London cigar bar. In July (aka in midst of Ukraine escapades). Which he emailed to John Solomon. With the subject line “Smoke Filled Room Pre-Game Ritual.” pic.twitter.com/auke0BrUoA

— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) November 12, 2019

Apparently, he has a great fear that someone is going to poison him.

Cassidy Hutchinson is still on her book tour. And she has some more tea (or, should I say, condiments)on Trump’s bizarre phobias and obsessions. He isn’t just an authoritarian monster, he’s also filled with weird paranoid neuroses:

Cassidy Hutchinson is not done airing out the sordid, amusing, sometimes confounding things she witnessed while working under Donald Trump. The former White House aide, whose book Enough is leading American sales, stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live and spent much of her time explaining, of all things, the former president’s apparent inability to eat lunch like a normal person.

Hutchinson’s testimony during last year’s January 6 hearings instantly went viral and, as Jimmy Kimmel put it on Wednesday night, “cast serious doubt on the highly professional, by-the-book reputation of the Trump administration.” Among other damning accusations, Hutchinson recalled a time when Trump threw his lunch against the wall in a fit of rage.

But apparently, that’s not even the half of it; even Trump’s ketchup allegedly has to pass muster.

“He does have a very potent fear of being poisoned,” Hutchinson told Kimmel. “… so he uses and prefers the small Heinz glass ketchup bottles because he likes to hear his valet—whoever is serving him his meal—he likes to hear the pop.”

What inspired this fear, Hutchinson’s host wondered—his ex-wives? Maybe, as the former staffer humorously suggested, it’s the whole Russia thing? Either way, it seems the former president’s staffers had a lot to worry about once the plates hit the table.

Returning to the moment in her testimony when she alleged that Trump had hurled his lunch at a wall, Hutchinson said, “Sometimes it would happen once or twice a week, sometimes more. Sometimes there would be a week or so lull, but then there would be a bad news story. But it wasn’t just launching the food and the plates and the porcelain at the wall. Sometimes it was just flipping the table.”

Although she says she’s now had a change of heart, Hutchinson told Kimmel she went to work for Trump after seeing him at a campaign rally and feeling a kinship with the crowd.

“Something clicked for me—like, that he was there to represent people like I was accustomed to growing up around,” Hutchinson said. “It was just this magnetism that I felt, and at the same time I did feel a draw to public service.”

When it came time for Hutchinson’s summer internship on Capitol Hill, she says, “naturally, things progressed for me.”

At this point, Hutchinson told Kimmel, she doesn’t regret her service in the Trump Administration.

“I used to say I was in the right place at the right time, and that’s how I got elevated to my role you know. Now I’m, was at the wrong place the wrong time? Wrong place at the right time? I don’t know.”

Analysts predict a massive drop in prices over the next few days and weeks. We’ll have to see if the media notices.

Over the past few weeks there has been non-stop hysteria over the gas price spike on the news. There has been lots of speculation about how it’s the death knell for Biden’s presidency , of course. Will they report this?

After spiking to alarming levels just last week, oil prices are suddenly in free-fall mode. The dramatic reversal should bring relief to drivers (and nervous central bankers) very soon.

US oil prices plunged by 5.6% to $84.22 a barrel on Wednesday, marking the biggest one-day decline in a year. Crude dropped even further Thursday, sinking as low as $82.24 a barrel, a five-week low.

This is quite the U-turn, even for the notoriously boom-to-bust oil market. As recently as last week, US crude briefly touched $95 a barrel and Wall Street banks were predicting $100 or higher amid Saudi Arabia and Russia’s aggressive supply cuts.

Now, gas prices are already starting to retreat and experts predict sharper drops to come.

The national average for regular gas dipped to $3.77 a gallon on Thursday, according to AAA. That’s 11 cents below the 2023 peak set last month when gas prices experienced an unusual post-Labor Day jump.

Gas prices will tumble to nearly $3.50 a gallon nationally over the next few weeks, Andy Lipow, president of consulting firm Lipow Oil Associates, told CNN.

Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service, told CNN he expects an even bigger tumble — to as low as $3.25 a gallon by Halloween. Pointing to sinking wholesale prices, Kloza said retail prices should drop each day by between 1.5 cents and 2.5 cents a gallon going forward.

“People at cocktail parties will finally be talking about gas prices in a good way,” Kloza said in a phone interview. “No doubt, it’s welcome news for the consumer portion of the economy.”

It’s welcome news. And most people will notice that the price has come down. But without media attention it won’t have the political salience it should have.

That first hearing was a train wreck. Is there any possibility that the next ones will be better?

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer did not cover himself with glory in the hearings and the Republicans are not happy. They seem to think it was just a bad performance (which it was) but the real problem is the total lack of any evidence justifying an impeachment.

The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone has the details:

The House Oversight Committee’s impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden didn’t begin with the bang Republicans had wanted. The first hearing, one week ago today, was seen by many impartial observers as disorganized and rudderless. No surprise there: This has been the case throughout the past several months of the Oversight Committee’s sprawling probes into the president and the business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden.

The backlash was everywhere, on Capitol Hill and in conservative media. You can even see the skepticism in polling of Republicans. According to a new Monmouth University poll, just three in ten Republicans put a lot of trust in the fairness of the impeachment inquiry. Half of registered voters have no confidence in the probe’s fairness, with an additional 33 percent claiming to have only “a little” confidence. Just 15 percent overall put a lot of trust in the fairness of the inquiry.

This has landed Comer in the doghouse. Republicans bemoaned his inability to find credible witnesses with any firsthand knowledge of the Biden family’s alleged corruption, and the ones his committee did bring forward made clear they do not believe there is sufficient evidence to impeach the president (yet³).

Now, there are whispers that a “reset” is needed and that Comer might have to hand over control of the inquiry to someone Republicans think might be more capable, like House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. Jordan, a former Freedom Caucus chairman, has been much more aggressive in his own hearings on Judiciary and the Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee, and he has significant allies in the right wing of the House Republican conference. But he’d still have to deal with the same evidence, or lack thereof, that Comer has. So it’s unclear what problem he could fix.

There is also the issue of a House without a speaker. While Republicans insist that they can continue their work, everything will be sidelined until the speaker question has been settled. If Jordan assumes the role, then he won’t take the reins from Comer, but he could also steer the impeachment with a stronger hand than McCarthy ever did.

The role of Oversight chairman during Republican-controlled Congresses is primarily that of a showman. Marquee hearings and explosive revelations are how they move the needle in upcoming elections. If Comer wants to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors.⁴ then he needs to demonstrate the ability to change public perception and create headlines. So far, he’s done the opposite—and his friends and colleagues are taking note.

1-There are about 100 of these little secret offices in the Capitol building set aside for use by senior members and are often granted as a courtesy so they don’t have to travel through the tunnels back to the adjoining office buildings like many of the rank and file members.

2-Among Republicans, of course, not the whole House.

3-This is a big caveat. Republicans and conservative media place a high priority on staying a member of the team. There is a strong likelihood that skeptics might come around as this inquiry progresses, even if no new bombshell evidence or smoking guns are produced.

4-The past two Republican chairmen of the Oversight Committee, Reps. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), are now paid Fox News contributors.

I think the inquiry will continue. Whether a vote to impeach passes the House largely rests on how tainted the GOP moderates are with right wing craziness at the time. That could go either way. But I’ll be shocked if this fizzles. It’s one of the animating issues on the right and it’s hard to see how they’ll give that up. Also, Dear Leader wants it very badly.

Say it ain’t so…

It’s been obvious that Rudy Giuliani drinks to excess for a long time. He’s shown up on Fox News inebriated more than once, as was obvious to anyone watching. In the infamous interview “Over Bloody Mary’s with NY Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi” he was described like this:

His ex-wife had implied, in an interview with New York, that he was an alcoholic. Others anonymously question his mental state. “Oh yeah, yeah — I do a lot of drugs,” Giuliani said sarcastically. “There was one I was addicted to. I’ve forgotten what it is. I don’t know where the drug things come from — I really don’t. The alcohol comes from the fact that I did occasionally drink. I love Scotch. I can’t help it. All of the malts. And part of it is cigars — I love to have them with cigars. I’m a partyer.”

Here’s some evidence. Although some of them are probably just Rudy being nuts, there’s little doubt that he was imbibing heavily during this period:

This speech on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 was truly epic:

According to the NY Times this week, the prosecutors really are looking at Giuliani’s drinking on election night (and probably after that) on regards to Trump’s potential claim that he was just listening to his lawyers:

For more than a decade, friends conceded grimly, Mr. Giuliani’s drinking had been a problem. And as he surged back to prominence during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, it was getting more difficult to hide it.

On some nights when Mr. Giuliani was overserved, an associate discreetly signaled the rest of the club, tipping back his empty hand in a drinking motion, out of the former mayor’s line of sight, in case others preferred to keep their distance. Some allies, watching Mr. Giuliani down Scotch before leaving for Fox News interviews, would slip away to find a television, clenching through his rickety defenses of Mr. Trump.

Even at less rollicking venues — a book party, a Sept. 11 anniversary dinner, an intimate gathering at Mr. Giuliani’s own apartment — his consistent, conspicuous intoxication often startled his company.

“It’s no secret, nor do I do him any favors if I don’t mention that problem, because he has it,” said Andrew Stein, a former New York City Council president who has known Mr. Giuliani for decades. “It’s actually one of the saddest things I can think about in politics.”

No one close to Mr. Giuliani, 79, has suggested that drinking could excuse or explain away his present legal and personal disrepair. He arrived for a mug shot in Georgia in August not over rowdy nightlife behavior or reckless cable interviews but for allegedly abusing the laws he defended aggressively as a federal prosecutor, subverting the democracy of a nation that once lionized him.

Yet to almost anyone in proximity, friends say, Mr. Giuliani’s drinking has been the pulsing drumbeat punctuating his descent — not the cause of his reputational collapse but the ubiquitous evidence, well before Election Day in 2020, that something was not right with the former president’s most incautious lieutenant.

Now, prosecutors in the federal election case against Mr. Trump have shown an interest in the drinking habits of Mr. Giuliani — and whether the former president ignored what his aides described as the plain inebriation of the former mayor referred to in court documents as “Co-Conspirator 1.”

In a normal world this would be a problem for Donald Trump but I doubt that his cult will hear about it and even if they did they wouldn’t believe it.

Lol:

Former President Donald Trump is considering a visit to the Capitol next week where he is open to pitching himself as a speaker candidate, according to a Republican familiar with internal discussions.

If it happens, Trump would come speak to the House GOP sometime before lawmakers’ internal speaker election, which is set to happen on Wednesday, that person said. A final decision hasn’t yet been made. The full GOP will meet Tuesday for an internal “candidate forum.”

It’s not clear if Trump — the frontrunner in the 2024 presidential primary — would actually run for speaker. Winning would require near-unanimity from the House GOP, a difficult hurdle for the controversial former president. One of his closest Hill allies, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, is already in the race. (Jordan told NBC that he discussed his speakership bid with Trump this week.)

It remains a longshot idea: The House has never elected a speaker who wasn’t a member of Congress, though it is not technically a constitutional requirement. Trump could also run into problems with the GOP’s own conference rules, which state a member of GOP leadership is required to step aside “if indicted for a felony for which a sentence of two or more years imprisonment may be imposed.”

Can you believe it???

Still, the former president has openly flirted with the idea of becoming GOP speaker in the days since Kevin McCarthy’s fall. And several members, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga), have backed the idea.

Trump: ‘A lot of people have been calling me about speaker’

“A lot of people have been calling me about speaker. All I can say is we’ll do whatever is best for the country and the Republican Party,” Trump told reporters Wednesday.

He’s not going to do it, of course. It’s absurd. He’s just looking for attention and wants everyone to see he’s beloved by the GOP establishment.

We are living through something and I can’t tell from day to day if it’s tragedy or farce. I guess it’s probably both.

Oh great

I’ve argued that he is more likely to take votes from Trump than Biden. But it appears that at this point in the cycle anyway, I’m wrong. He does take more from Biden. Dan Pfeiffer writes about it in his newsletter today:

Politico also reports that American Values 2024, a Super PAC supporting Kennedy Jr., has commissioned polling and is preparing for an independent bid.

While multiple polls demonstrated that the No Labels and West candidacies could hurt Biden, the initial speculation was that Kennedy would hurt Trump more. On its face, Kennedy Jr. has been running as MAGA’s favorite Democrat. He is a regular on Fox News and other MAGA media outlets, where he mostly attacks Biden, spouts anti-vax conspiracy theories, and toes the Trump line on Russia. If West pulls disaffected liberals from Biden, and the No Labels ticket is a place for Republicans and independents that disapprove of Biden, shouldn’t RFK Jr. take votes from Trump?

What the Polls Say

Most of the polling shows Kennedy Jr. getting  10% and 20% of the vote against Biden in the primary. The number generally decreased over the course of the year as people learned more about his disturbing views on a wide range of issues.

Kennedy Jr. has made zero effort to appeal to Democratic primary voters. Based on his rhetoric and schedule, it would be easy to assume he was actually running for the Republican nomination. The results of his approach can be seen in his approval rating. In a September Quinnipiac poll, Kennedy Jr.’s favorable rating is 32/35, with 31% who haven’t heard enough about him to form an opinion. However, that number is driven by Republican support — 48% of Republicans view him favorably. Among Democrats, only 14% are favorable, while 57% hold unfavorable views.

It’s bad for Trump to have someone so adored by Republicans on the ballot, right?

Well, maybe not.

A new poll from Echelon Insights, a well-respected GOP polling firm, shows that a Kennedy Jr. independent bid hurts Biden more than Trump. In a two-way race, Trump is up three on Biden. Trump’s lead grows to four when Kennedy Jr. is added to the mix. One point is mostly statistical noise and nothing worth worrying about this far from the election. The more interesting data can be found in the crosstabs. Kennedy Jr. gets 14% in a three-way race. But more of those votes come from Democratic-leaning voters than Republicans.

Additionally, 13% of self-identified liberals and 16% of 2020 Biden voters support Robert Kennedy Jr. Only 9% of conservatives and 10% of Trump voters defect to RFK Jr.

Why Another MAGA Candidate Helps Trump (For Now)

These findings may be surprising given Kennedy Jr.’s MAGA credentials, but there are a few reasons why his candidacy deals less damage to Trump at the moment. First, many Republicans who approve of RFK Jr. are committed Trump voters. Therefore, they like RFK Jr.’s MAGA vibes but stick with Trump. Second, some Democrats and independents supporting Kennedy Jr. are unaware of his stances on vaccines and other issues. As Kennedy Jr. is further scrutinized, some of those voters should return to Biden. Finally, the biggest reason is that, as of right now, there are more Democrats unhappy with Biden than Republicans unhappy with Trump. As Democrats become more engaged with the race, that will change (if it doesn’t change, democracy is screwed).

You don’t need a decoder ring to see what is happening here. Steve Bannon reportedly encouraged Kennedy Jr. to run. Some of his biggest supporters are MAGA media personalities like Tucker Carlson. His campaign and Super PAC are being funded by Trump supporters. According to a report by ABC News:

The super PAC, which can support Kennedy with outside advertising and other spending but cannot directly coordinate with him, raised a total of $9.7 million through the end of June.

Almost all of that sum, 96%, came from two megadonors, one of them with a history of donating to Republicans: $5 million, more than 50% of the group’s total receipts for the first half of the year, was given by Timothy Mellon, heir to the Mellon banking fortune, who previously gave more than $20 million to a super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump during the 2020 election cycle.

Encouraging third-party candidates has been part of Trump’s strategy since 2020, when Jared Kushner was reportedly involved in helping Kanye West. The original idea was for Kennedy Jr. to sow chaos in the Democratic Primary. Despite his famous name, he has been unsuccessful. Therefore, becoming an independent candidate to attack Biden from the Left on some issues (military spending) and the Right on others (immigration) is the logical next move for someone out to damage Biden. Kennedy Jr. can accumulate online attention and raise money to attack Biden — who could end up fighting a two-front war.

In the end, RFK Jr. may pull more from Trump, as Nate Silver has argued. He may have no impact at all. The campaign will change between now and next fall. Getting on the ballot is not easy or cheap, and Kennedy Jr. is unpredictable. But as of right now — his candidacy could represent another potential challenge for a President with no margin of error.

It’s literal insanity. But as someone who went through 2000 and had massive arguments with Nader voters (when the stakes were even lower) I am not sanguine that Kennedy isn’t going to appeal to people who don’t understand that their desire to either make a point about the political system by voting for someone who represents their disdain or voting for someone who is more perfect on an issue they care about will actually make the opposite point and empower someone who is invariably even more hostile to the issues they care about. It’s an age-old argument in American which has a system that leads it to maintain a two party system whether we like it or not.

Obviously, the stakes have never been higher than they are now. Not even close. Look at what the Republicans are doing in congress just this week. Look at what their standard bearer is saying outside the courtroom in New York as he stands trial for fraud. We are in deep deep trouble and we don’t have the luxury of empty gestures.

God help us if we can’t persuade every person who isn’t captured by the MAGA cult to vote Democratic this time.